Innovative artist Kevin Page also plays Bum on ‘Dallas’

Were Kevin Page to walk down Elm Street, chances are no one would have the slightest clue about who he is. It may be, however, that everyone who passes him has seen him before, laughed with him or at him or even felt chilled by him.

Page is a character actor, an occupation he has successfully pursued for almost 30 years. He played a recurring character on the TV megahit Seinfeld. He was NBC executive Stu Chermack, who invited Jerry to pitch his “show about nothing.”

That was the ’90s. It’s another megahit that has Page leaving a lasting imprint on television viewers in 2013. He plays Bum on TNT’s reboot of Dallas, which opens its second season Monday. Bum is J.R. Ewing’s sidekick or henchman, as Page likes to say.

At 54, Page is an incredibly versatile actor who as Bum looks nothing like the Page you see on the street or the one you saw on Seinfeld, when he embodied an entirely different character and a funny one at that.

“I’d just like to stay on my show. I love that show,” Page says of Dallas. “It’s so much fun.”

A Dallas producer reminded Page in the early days of filming that, no matter how big Seinfeld was, Dallas is bigger in one respect: It’s a huge hit internationally.

Page is about so much more than Chermack or Bum. In addition to being an actor who starred on the locally produced PBS series Wishbone, died in the movie Robocop, and has filmed more than two dozen television commercials, he’s also a gifted artist who excels in a style he calls new pointillism. He has a pair of patents pending on technology involving a robotic device that allows him to paint within hours or days what would have taken years to create in the past.

Georges Seurat, a French post-impressionist painter who died in 1891 and is considered the father of pointillism, took two years to create what Page and many others deem his masterpiece, A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte (1884–1886). Page has painted a robotically assisted version of Seurat’s signature work that took about six weeks to complete.

“I believe we’re at a point now,” Page says, “where we could go beyond what a human could do 100 times faster than what you could do by hand.” Page recently took part in a group exhibition at a Dallas gallery, Alan Simmons Art + Design, that led to a solo show at the same venue. It opens with a reception on Feb. 23.

Born in Oklahoma, Page moved with his family to Nebraska when he was a child. He earned an undergraduate theater degree in Nebraska and moved to Dallas when he got a scholarship to attend the graduate theater program at Southern Methodist University. It went swimmingly the first year, but then Page landed the part in Robocop over the summer, and filming dragged on into the fall semester. He had to tell his theater professor that he would not be returning on time.

“She said to me famously at some point,” and here he mimics a woman speaking with a lofty British accent, “‘You’ve got to choose between the thee-uh-tuh and this movie thing.’ I thought about it for 48 hours and ended up getting my master’s from Robocop.”

Married to a software executive, Linda, who’s the mother of Page’s 9-year-old daughter, Isabella, the actor harbors no regret about leaving SMU. A life lived purely in the thee-uh-tuh doesn’t seem anywhere close to fitting his style. He has worked as investment banker and has an entrepreneurial side now flexing its muscles in the tandem he’s trying to pursue in merging pointillism with robotics, a tool he hopes to apply in schools and share with other artists.

He believes his robotic technology can help in the educational effort dubbed STEAM, which stands for Science, Technology, Engineering, Art and Mathematics. It’s a movement that sprang from the collective feeling that Americans are falling behind in creating scientists.

As Page puts it, “Science is the why of things, technology is the how of things, art is the meaning of things.” He sees his patented robotic creation as being able to play a role in spearheading STEAM as a widespread movement. “I’ve been an artist in one form or another my entire life,” he says.

Not that his various pursuits resemble each other all that much.

“With acting, you have to audition,” he says. “You get head shots, you get an agent. Somebody has to tell you that you have permission to work. But as a writer, you can roll out of bed in your underwear. You can throw on a robe and for 12 hours you can create, create, create. It’s much the same way with painting, which is one of the many reasons I love it so much.”

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Kevin Page stars as Bum in the second season of Dallas, which premieres at 8 Monday night on TNT. His solo exhibition opens Feb. 23 with a reception from 5 to 8:30 p.m. at Alan Simmons Art + Design, 1415 Slocum St., Suite 105, Dallas. Free. 214-745-2526. alansimmons.net.